Faking It
December 30th, 2002
The current series of Channel 4’s Faking It came to an end this evening with the story of Chris Sweeney, punk rocker turned classical conductor.
[For readers outside the UK, the premise of the show is that the production team take someone with no relevant skills or experience in a particular competitive field and hand them over to a couple of mentors for four weeks. The aim is that they’ll learn enough to enter some sort of competitive event in the field in question and fool the judges - who aren’t affiliated with the show - into believing that they’ve been doing it for years.]
Sometimes the fun of the show lies in seeing someone who isn’t at all sure they have what it takes grow in confidence, but occasionally they get someone who ends up being so arrogant that you want them to fail miserably. (I’m thinking of a certain computer game tester turned racing driver.) Tonight’s season closer was one of the former, and was perhaps the best of the series. My favourite moment came towards the end, after the performance, when one of the judges who had correctly identified Chris as the fake was asked why exactly he’d awarded Chris the highest score of the four conductors in that night’s competition. Embarrassed wasn’t the word… (We were told that the judge later claimed, off-camera, that he’d been “confused.” Yeah, right.)
More generally, I liked the way that punk rocker Chris - who doesn’t play an instrument or read music - threw himself into the task of learning how to conduct an entire classical piece from memory rather than try to teach himself to read music and learn to conduct. Just to make life a bit more complicated, halfway through his four weeks of intensive training Chris’ girlfriend for the past six years dumped him. I thought that he might give up, but he focussed and threw himself into his conducting and did really well.
I think this was the second series of Faking It. Somehow I never picked up on the first, but I’ll certainly be watching for the third.
January 3rd, 2003 at 3:14 pm
I’ve been watching this series since early on, and whilst I was impressed with the first couple of programmes, I quickly caught on to the scam.
The ones I’ve seen were things like a cellist becoming a house DJ, a vicar becoming a car salesman, a country gent becoming a club bouncer or a emergency call-centre controller becoming a television producer.
In most cases, the programme’s producers seem to have chosen people who are likely to be able to adapt to the new situation they find themselves in; the emergency call centre controller learning how to control a television gallery production, a cellist learning how to mix records.
I’d like to see people being thrown into situations that are totally alien to them; a binman becoming a brain surgeon, a baker learning how to defuse landmines, a school teacher finding out what hard work is like. etc. etc.
January 4th, 2003 at 2:27 pm
I think the problem is that throwing someone into a situation that’s too far beyond their experience would result in fairly poor TV, because a lot of them would either give up and never get as far as completing the challenge, or else be so utterly defeated that their attempt to get past the judges was a farce. One element in the series’ success is that usually the mentors hover somewhere between confidence that the trainee can pull it off if they’ll just work at it and despair that they’ve got a hopeless case, or one for whom everything will have to go just right. If they were in despair throughout because their trainee was obviously unsuited to the task at hand the formula wouldn’t work as well.
If the conductor in the last episode had just walked out in front of the orchestra in his punk rock gear and reduced the orchestra to a shambles by not so much as keeping time, or if the games tester turned racing driver had always either stalled the car at the start or gone off at the first corner, we wouldn’t have had much of a show.